Halloween Eve

On the train this morning I ran into one of the saxophone players from ‘Sax and the City’ – a quartet of sax players that used to play in the subway under the Music Under New York banner. He just returned from a tour of China with the ’42nd Street’ musical. While there he discovered he has cancer in his throat… I feel so sad about this. He is going through a hard time at the moment, not so much on account of the illness, but – on account of the terrible health care system in this country! He has health insurance, but he can’t find a clinic that will accept him. He spent the last week making phone calls and dropping by clinics, to no avail. The longer it takes him to find a clinic to accept him the worse it will be to operate on the tumor. Why can’t the USA learn from smaller countries who have excellent health care systems?

When I got to the 14th street subway station Alberto was playing there with a friend – both of them on pan flutes. Waiting for them to finish, I set on the bench and put on my witch costume. Every year on Halloween and the preceding day I dress up as a witch to play in the subway. It is so much fun being a witch 🙂 It enables me to be as dramatic as I want with my moves while playing the musical saw.

Carlos, a reporter from the Spanish newspaper ‘El Mundo’ came to interview me. Those of you in Spain – the article will come out day after tomorrow.

People asked me why I dressed up as a witch today when Halloween is actually tomorrow. I explained that the witches are already gathering on the Eve of the holiday, so that we can start celebrating early tomorrow morning. That’s why the witches are already here 🙂

Somebody left a note in my doantions bucket. The note says: ‘Awesome!! Sorry I don’t have enough money to put in the bucket. Beautiful!’ and a picture of a heart.
I cherrish the notes people put in my bucket. Of course money is nice (who doesn’t like money), but the money – I’m just going to spend and it will be gone. The notes – those I’ll keep forever.

If you have XM Radio – I will be playing the musical saw on the XM Radio Halloween special on the ‘Fine Tuning’ – channel 76 tomorrow, October 31st. The show runs from 8pm to midnight Eastern time.
If you have an AOL account (it’s free to sign up) than you can hear the show on the Internet on the AOL radio.

Happy Halloween!